Re: Small update to reversed_comparison_code

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    >     But, over the last several weeks we've had broken 3.0 branch
    >     bootstraps on Solaris, 

    > Yes, but nothing could have prevented that

    I think statistics play a role here.  In the beginning testing will
    uncover a very small percentage of the bugs put into the software,
    that doesn't mean that it should not be done.  As testing matures, it
    is indeed able to catch an ever growing portion of bugs put in.

    In this case, I think in time, testing indeed would have caught it.

You miss my point.  Testing would have given the wrong answer.  It would
have said "There's something wrong with this patch".  But there isn't: there
was some unrelated latent bug.

The person submitting the patch might have made some minor change which
would cause it not to trigger the latent bug and then we wouldn't have
found it.

My point is that the only way to know that there was a latent bug here that
needed fixing was exactly the sequence that occurred.